London tube Ticket (OT)

[Rick Hughes]

yes from counter or from machine

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite - perhaps marginal cost is the name I'm searching for. Governments of all colours have a habit of saying what things cost - then when that service or whatever is removed, the saving is nothing like the figure given.

It's much easier to work out the true cost of the winter fuel allowance or free TV licence - yet 'free' travel gets mentioned as if it is exactly the same.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

School kids also get a degree of free travel in London.

[whisky-dave]

Once you've got an oystercard and reqistar it on line you can go for auto t= op up which means when it goes below =A310 IIRC it adds =A320 via you bank = account or credit/debit card. I normmaly nominate a particualar station to = collect my travel card but I think pay as you go can be collected on buses.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You've omitted a more serious one - the bus is full so a 'paying' passenger can't board.

[bert]

For non LA buses some services receive a direct subsidy. Others are run as commercial services and the LA has absolutely no control over them.

This figure is used by our LA to assess whether a particular subsidised service should continue. The operator is interested in income versus cost of provision.

I suspect that these marginal costs are not very significant compared to the cost of running an empty bus around the route. The marginal labour cost is zero. Bus usage has peaks and troughs and a bus cannot easily be switched on and off to meet those peaks. We have a service near us which is heavily loaded immediately after

09:30 for the next 2 or 3 runs and the answer from the operator is - get a later bus. They would rather spread the load onto more lightly loaded times which makes more commercial sense. Of course commercial considerations may be a foreign concept to users of London Transport.

[John Williamson]

No, that's just an inconvenience for the passenger, it's not normally a cost to either the company or the council. At worst, one full fare is lost, but if the route is that busy, it's normally a frequent service, and people will wait, so the company get the fare anyway. No bus company will ever guarantee that there will always be a space, or even that the bus will always run. First come, first served. If it happens regularly, words are normally said, and schedules altered accordingly. In the rush hour, I've seen full buses just ignore the queue waiting and drive past with the company backing the driver up. If it happens at the Company I work for that a passenger phones up and complains, we ask the driver if he was fully loaded, if, and only if, he says he wasn't, we book a taxi. We then call him in to the office for a quiet word, and he's been known to have to pay the taxi fare out of his own pocket. Other companies aren't always as obliging, but we have a good reputation with our passengers, and we'd like to keep it, thank you very much.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Or you could get an earlier one? Most PT systems are already subsidised - would you like to see this increased?

They too vary the service according to load.

[John Williamson]

There is still a cost per journey agreed, over and above any subsidy agreed by the council and the operator.

True. operators take into account the expected number of journeys by pass holders when negotiating any subsidy.

Incidentally, operators will be hit in a number of ways this year. The bus service operators' grant will probably reduce again, as will the amount per trip paid for all pass holder journeys, and many councils are removing the subsidy on any route not considered by the council to be essential. Fuel is also expected to go up by much more than fares can be increased. Expect to see fewer buses driving round by Christmas. especially during off peak periods.

One council near here has removed the subsidy from all school bus services for "faith schools", and are making the conditions for getting a child pass more stringent. This has completely removed a dozen or more peak hour services in a nearby town, making the rest even more crowded., and driving parents to using their cars to drop the children off at school.

[Apellation Controlee]

Any stage carriage bus service, so it doesn't include National Express. For a long distance journey you would need to daisy-chain your journeys.

See

for more.

[bert]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

Bus services are either commercial in which case they are not subsidised and are licensed by a District Commissioner or supported in which case they receive a subsidy from the LA and the LA then has a say in the route and frequency of service. Majority of our day time services Mon-Sat are commercial. Most early morning/evening/Sunday are supported and have just been cut.

[bert]

We're seeing that already. New time tables this month as LA cuts £500k from subsidy.

Couple of contentious cuts to school buses here also.

[tim.....]

There is at least one example of a bus company withdrawing a bus route because an excess of twirlies stopped fare paying passengers get on the bus

tim

[John Williamson]

Do tell. I've never heard of it happening.

[bert]

time in the timetable.

Neither have I and it seems a most unlikely thing to do. There was a problem in the early days on a route in Scotland where a bus company would insist fare paying passengers boarded first. Can't remember what the outcome was.

[Apellation Controlee]

They do in this area - You "buy" a zero-value ticket for each journey and the pass card is read by a contact sensor on the ticket machine.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Bureaucracy gone mad.

[Apellation Controlee]

How so? There's no more effort at the point of delivery than issuing a ticket to a paying passenger, no more effort when dumping data from the ticket machine back at bus HQ. Added to that, the LA gets real information about how much use is being made of the pass cards. Better than an arbitrary allocation based on the number of cards issued, whether they are used or not.

[John Williamson]

Not really. It's the easiest way to keep the bus company honest and let the council know just how popular the passes are.

It's no more bureaucratic than insisting that every paying passenger must have a valid ticket. That's to make sure the drivers and passengers are honest.

[bert]

In message , Apellation Controlee writes

So they do here, but they still pay on basis of average adult fare per journey. Does the driver actually put in your destination?